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If two of a nation's biggest cultural icons are face-changing aliens it should be considered more than a coincidence. Born in the public imagination within six years of each other David Bowie and Doctor Who have taken strangely similar journeys.

The transition between leaders of any movement is always hard to achieve. An audience gets used to a certain style and it's always tough to know when to go for more of the same and when to throw in something fresh.

The news that Doctor Who's 50th anniversary special would be broadcast in 3D should, given my interest in 3D media and my long-term fandom of the Doctor and his TARDIS, be the final tipping point that pushes me over the edge into investing in a new 3D TV.

The BBC had a nasty habit of wiping old recordings to reuse the tapes. Had it not been for one heroic BBC staff member, armies of fans and occasional discoveries in foreign TV archives it could have been a lot worse, but the fact remains that we are still missing 106 episodes.

There are few tales as heart-warmingly, iconically festive as the traditional story of a lonely young boy who builds a snowman in his back garden, only for it to come to life and lead him on an exciting adventure... to destroy humanity.

They say the creators of the film Snakes on a Plane started with the title and worked backwards. I know, that's a surprise, right? It's so good, you'd think they spent ages brainstorming which kinds of animals would feature.

Daleks. It was as if I'd been waiting for them. Like they were an inevitable discovery, not something somebody had just dreamed up. And meeting one for real - that didn't seem then, as it does to me now, like the most incredible and lucky privilege. It seemed like it was naturally bound to happen.

I will gladly fight anybody who calls for its dismantling or questions its pedigree. I will gasp at a Doctor Who slur, rebuff a Blue Peter insult and smack down a Monty Python dismissal. The thing I've been taking issue with lately is the BBC's bizarre course of re-branding exercises.

All we know so far is that Yates wants to take the character in a new direction, distancing himself from not only the current 11th Doctor Matt Smith, but from the whole post-Russell T. Davies (the man who revived the series in 2005 after a long hiatus) era.